Wednesday, December 10, 2014

With yesterday's heavily redacted release of only about 20% of the CIA torture report, it seems timely to post this extract from my forthcoming book...

By this time, the cabal
of deeply ambitious politicians who controlled George W. Bush had
already seized control of the White House. Their success hinged on 25
electoral college votes from the state of Florida, where major US TV
networks twice rescinded predictions of a winner based on unreliable
machine-counted votes. The US Supreme Court eventually intervened to
stop a second manual recount in Florida, after the first was declared
unreliable. Bush was sworn in as President despite losing the
nation's popular vote by over half a million ballots.

President George W.
Bush (aka “Dubya” or “Bush 43”) was only the second person
after John Quincy Adams to become US President after his father had
also served as President. George H. W. Bush (aka “Bush 41”)
had served as CIA Director (1976-77), Vice President (1981-89) and
then an unpopular one-term President from 1989 to 1993.

Some claim that Dubya's
grandfather Prescott Bush, a Senator from 1952 to 1963, was
also penciled onto a list of possible 1960 Presidential candidates
by his golfing buddy, President Eisenhower.
But Prescott Bush might also have had trouble winning the popular
vote, because as a director of the Union Banking Corporation he had
been convicted under the Trading With The Enemy Act for hiding Nazi
investments during World War Two.

Curiously, the US
lawyer whose company helped Prescott Bush hide Union Bank's Nazi
assets was Allen Welsh Dulles, who Eisenhower later appointed first
civilian director of the CIA. Prior to WWII, however, lawyer brothers
Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles (who later became US Secretary of
State) handled German WWI reparation payments while operating a
Berlin office for US businessmen dealing with Hitler's regime. Many
of their wealthy US customers were disappointed when Japan's 1941
attack on Pearl Harbor triggered the United States' entry into war
against Hitler's Third Reich.

Widespread US support
for European Fascism has now been all but eradicated from the history
books, but in fact the 1930s saw large Fascist rallies across the
USA. In 1937, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd,
complained:

"A clique of U.S. industrialists is
hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic
government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany
and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to
witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the
Nazi regime. . . . Certain American industrialists had a great deal
to do with bringing Fascist regimes into being in
both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the
seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there."

A year later, President
Roosevelt spelled it out even more clearly:

"The first
truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people
tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes
stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in essence, is
fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by
any other controlling power... Among us today, a concentration of
private power without equal in history is growing."

- President
Franklin D. Roosevelt , April 29, 1938.

President Roosevelt was
reportedly deeply suspicious of Allen Dulles, and authorized British
intelligence to wire-tap Dulles’ office. Roosevelt set up a new
intelligence agency, the Office of the Coordinator of Information
(which later became the CIA), and appointed Allen Dulles as head of
the New York branch. Ironically, Dulles’ primary task was to
investigate the very US business links he himself had established
with the Nazis. According to one author, “Roosevelt was giving
Dulles enough rope to hang himself.”

When British wiretaps
proved that Dulles was continuing to work with his German business
clients, Roosevelt seized a batch of Dulles-linked firms, including
Prescott Bush's Union Banking Corp, under the Trading with the Enemy
Act. Prescott Bush was convicted by the U.S. government and fined one
million dollars. But Dulles himself was not charged with anything.
The COI became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Allen
Dulles spent the duration of WWII as the OSS station chief in Berne,
Switzerland.

On April 12th, 1945,
less than a month before Germany surrendered and shortly after being
re-elected, President Roosevelt died. Although he was a heavy smoker
and had been wheelchair bound after suffering childhood polio,
Roosevelt’s sudden death has always been a favourite subject for
conspiracy theorists. The official cause of death was “brain hemorrhage” but Roosevelt’s doctor always (publicly at least)
insisted he was healthy and his medical records were never found.

Allen Dulles moved back
to Berlin at the end of hostilities. He helped many influential
former SS agents flee the country with their wealth and sometimes
even their reputations intact, as the CIA recruited thousands of
ex-Nazis into the US intelligence services. At the same time, the CIA
was also recruiting Japanese War Criminals who had performed gruesome
biological weapons experiments on live human beings, including women
and children, with the secret Unit 731.

As CIA Director, Dulles
went on to oversee the CIA's MKULTRA mind control experiments and
Operation Mockingbird, a project to infiltrate and control mainstream
media organisations. He was involved in the 1953 coup in Iran and the
1954 coup in Guatemala, along with the deadly sabotage of Cuba by
Operation 40. But in 1961, after the Bay Of Pigs fiasco (details of which the CIA still refuses to disclose on the grounds that it "might confuse the public"), Allen Dulles
and his closest cohorts were finally sacked. President John F.
Kennedy angrily declared that he wanted to "splinter the
CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds."

Two years later, Allen
Dulles was appointed to the Warren Commission, which investigated
Kennedy's assassination. And we all know how that turned out.

*

George Herbert Walker Bush
(“Bush 41”), an ambitious West Texas oil man, allegedly became a
CIA agent around the same time Allen Dulles was fired. He was appointed Director of the CIA by President Ford after
CIA boss William Colby was dismissed in the wake of the Nixon
Watergate scandal.

Colby, who later died
in a mysterious boating accident, was sacked because he had been too
open about CIA secrets exposed by the post-Watergate Church
Commission inquiry. Bush's job was to shut down the public flow of
information and restore CIA staff morale. No doubt he also had
personal reasons for wanting CIA secrets kept out of the public eye:
according to one Nixon staffer, when Bush heard about the Watergate "smoking gun"
transcript "he broke into assholes and shit himself to death".

Speaking of death, a US
citizen was assassinated in the middle of Washington DC in 1976,
while Bush was CIA Director, and very few people nowadays even know
about it. Ronni Moffit was killed when Chilean secret service agents
blew up the car she was traveling in with her husband and her boss,
Orlando Letelier, the de facto leader of the Chilean resistance after
the 1973 US-backed coup that brought the dictator Augusto Pinochet to
power. The State Department and the FBI were aware the Chilean
agents had entered the USA on false visas, claiming they were “on
CIA business”. According to John Dinges, co-author of Assassination
on Embassy Row, "the CIA had inside intelligence about the
assassination alliance at least two months before Letelier was killed
but failed to act to stop the plans."

Bush lasted less than a
year as CIA Director. When incoming President Jimmy Carter replaced
him, Bush started plotting his own run for the White House. Like
Prescott Bush, the unpopular George H. W. Bush was considered
“unelectable” when he ran against Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan
for the 1980 GOP nomination. As Reagan warned the Republican Party
faithful:

“A
coalition of multinational corporate executives, big-city bankers,
and hungry power brokers... want to give you George Bush... their
purpose is to control the American government.”

Bush in turn ridiculed
Reagan's “trickle-down economics” - based on massive tax cuts for
the rich - as “voodoo economics”. Bush eventually lost the GOP
nomination, but used his strong political and financial connections
to pressure his way onto the winning Reagan-Bush ticket.

As Vice President under
Ronald Reagan, “Bush Senior” was involved in the Iran-Contra
scandal, where the CIA illegally sold guns to fund guerrillas in
Nicaragua (Bush escaped public censure and later pardoned all those
those indicted or convicted in the affair). Curiously, when President
Reagan was shot and nearly killed by John Hinkley Junior in 1981, the
brother of the “lone gunman” was scheduled to have dinner with
Vice President Bush's son Neil Bush on the following day. With Reagan
hospitalized, Bush's spokesperson repeatedly dismissed media
questions about this as a mere coincidence.

Riding the coat-tails
of Reagan's popularity to become President himself in 1988, George H.
W. Bush's election catch-phrase was, “Read my lips: no new taxes.”
GOP voters had been duped into thinking Reagan's “trickle-down
economics” was working miracles, but in fact the national deficit
tripled to $220 billion between 1980 and 1990. After President Bush
betrayed voters by accepting a Democrats plan to cut spending and
raise taxes, his polls never recovered.

As a one-term
President, George H. W. Bush also invaded Panama to overthrow former
US ally Manuel Noriega, instituted the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA), and repelled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's 1990
invasion of Kuwait in what became knows as the Gulf War or the First Iraq War. Bush was heavily criticized by pro-war “hawks” at home after US
troops chased demoralised Iraqi troops all the way back to Basra,
leaving the highway from Kuwait strewn with slaughtered bodies and
demolished vehicles, but then returned home without removing Hussein
from power.

*

Sworn into power on
January 20th, 2001 as the United States' 43rd
President, George Walker “Dubya” Bush, was surrounded by many key
figures who had previously served in his father's 41st
administration. Many of them were determined to go back to Iraq and
“finish the job”.

Vice President
Dick Cheney, who served as Secretary of Defence under Bush 41
then became Chairman and CEO of the Halliburton oil company, had
“reluctantly” appointed himself as George W. Bush's running
mate after claiming he he could not find anyone more qualified.
Cheney held onto $39 million dollars worth of Halliburton stock
options, even though he had screened other VP candidates for just
such conflicts of interest.
He assembled a secret energy task force of senior oil executives (at
a time when Peak Oil was still being dismissed as a fantasy) and
allegedly pitched the coming invasion of Iraq to them as a solution
to all their problems
. After the invasion, Halliburton was awarded enormous no-bid
contracts and the company's stock price rose from about $6 a share
in 2002 to nearly $50 a share by end of 2005. Other oil companies
like Kellog, Brown and Root (KBR), which had links to the Bush
dynasty through Brown Brothers Harriman, also profited handsomely
from taxpayer funding. Cheney quickly became most powerful VP in US
history, redefining the role by assuming new powers without
challenge.

While
working as head of President
Nixon's Office of Economic
Opportunity,Donald
Rumsfeld had hired both Dick Cheney and Frank Carlucci (who
became Secretary of Defence under Reagan and later head of the
powerful Carlyle Group). Nixon called Rumsfeld “a ruthless little
bastard”. On November 4th 1975, in a massive cabinet
shake-up dubbed the “Holloween Massacre”, President Ford
appointed Rumsfeld his Secretary of Defence, Cheney his Chief of
Staff, and Bush 41 head of the CIA. In 1983, as Ronald Reagan's Special Envoy to the Middle East,
Rumsfeld was dispatched to meet Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in
Baghdad, to whom the US sold chemical weapons. It was Cheney
who recommended Rumsfeld become Bush 43's Secretary of Defence.

Promoted
to 4-star US Army General by Bush 41, Colin Powell served under four Presidents and was frequently touted as a
Presidential candidate himself. While not personally involved, he
was a member of the US Army unit that committed the My Lai massacre
in Vietnam, and later assisted in the attempted cover-up. Powell was Bush 41's President of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during
the 1990-91 Gulf War. Bush 43 appointed him the USA's first African
American Secretary of State. Applauded as a “moderate” because
he insisted that an international coalition was needed to legitimize
the US invasion of Iraq, Powell disgraced himself in February 2003
by presenting forged, fake and plagiarized evidence of alleged Iraq
Weapons Of Mass Destruction (WMDs) to the UN Security Council.
Powell later complained that he had been given only 4 days to review
the intelligence, and said Dick Cheney had joked with him: "You've
got high poll ratings; you can afford to lose a few points."

As
a senior CIA employee who
spent 26 years with “the agency”,
Robert Gates was also involved in the Iran-Contra
affair. Bush 41 had to nominate him twice before the Senate
confirmed his appointment as CIA Director in 1991. During his rocky
confirmation hearings, the New York Times reported that "Mr.
Gates distorted intelligence reports so they would conform to the
political beliefs of his superiors." Gates turned down Bush
43's offer to become the new Director of National Intelligence in
2005, but a year later he accepted an offer to replace Donald
Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, a position he retained through the
unsuccessful Bush “surge” in troops numbers until their 2011
“draw down” under President Obama.

Paul O'Neillturned down an offer to become Bush 41's Secretary Of Defence,
but accepted the role of Secretary of the Treasury under Bush 43. He
was fired in December 2002 after publishing a report warning of a
looming US financial crisis. He later told reporter Ron Suskind that
the invasion of Iraq was already being planned at the very first
cabinet meeting of the new Bush administration, and the debate was
not "should we attack Iraq?" but rather "how do we go
about attacking Iraq?"

In some ways, however,
the old guard from the Bush 41 administration were less bellicose
than the Neoconservatives (or “Neocons”) who now infested the
White House. Cheney and Rumsfeld were influential members of both
camps.

The Project for the New American Century (PNAC)
was a Neocon
think-tank established in 1997,
based on the premise that as
the world's sole remaining superpower, the United States was now well
positioned for 100 years of global dominance. Cheney
and Rumsfeld were among 25 signatories to the PNAC group's initial
“Statement of Principles”, along with Rumsfeld's deputy Paul
Wolfowitz, Dubya's brother Jeb Bush, and Cheney's Chief Of Staff
“Scooter” Libby. At least 18 PNAC members or signatories,
including John
Bolton, Elliott
Abrams, Richard
Perle, and Paul
Bremer, were appointed to key positions within President G.W.
Bush's administration.

A month before the 2000
election and a decade after the end of the Cold War, while many were
sensibly arguing that the US should begin scaling back its massive
military spending, the Neocons released
a PNAC document titled Rebuilding America's Defenses.
It argued that the USA should take a more pro-active role in
global "constabulary duties”,
and urged massive investment in the US military so it could “fight
and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars”. It
wanted the US military overhauled with modern, computerized weapons
such as drones, satellites and unmanned vehicles, and insisted the
USA needed to be able to dominate both space and cyberspace. But
Section V lamented the expected lack of US public and political
support for such radical and expensive changes, stating:

"The
process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is
likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing
event––like a new Pearl Harbor."

*

On August 6th, 2001, George W. Bush received a
presidential daily briefing, in which he was warned: “Bin Laden
Determined to Strike in U.S.” Bush listened to the briefing, then dismissed the CIA
staffer who delivered it:

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